A critic on a critic

• William Deresiewicz on James Wood in The Nation.

Wood's unwillingness to confront the contradictions in his thinking about these matters--to distinguish between realism and reality, artifice and experiment, character and person--points to a larger problem. Wood is a daring thinker, but he is not a particularly rigorous one. His powerfully associative mind tends to run him into logical cul-de-sacs that his supreme self-assurance prevents him from noticing. He often wanders from topic to topic, always too willing to be seduced from his path by the dappled description, the blooming detail. The general question tends to make him especially approximate; reading his critique of the gaseous George Steiner, I sometimes feel like I am watching two men beat each other with balloons. As at the larger scale, so at the smaller. Wood asserts that Mann's fiction is childlike because, among other things, it contains a lot of children. He says that human free will is not necessarily important to God, since God could have made us less free. While we might grant him enough room to argue that Morrison loves her characters too indulgently and then, four pages later, that she loves them less than she loves her language, we must draw the line when he tells us that Hamsun's characters "lie both to themselves and to us" and then, later in the same paragraph, that in his work "a character can lie neither to us nor to himself."

Wood's critical authority has become so daunting, it seems, that even he is afraid to challenge it. His argumentative method rests far too heavily on hand-waving, and while he is superb at turning a phrase, the fact that something sounds good doesn't guarantee that it makes any sense. Wood never stops to ask himself what his favorite formulas actually mean: characters who feel "real to themselves," who "forget" they're in a novel and so forth. These are obviously only metaphors, but metaphors for what? What, for that matter, does "lifeness" mean? And to what extent is Wood willing to take responsibility for his assertion, near the end of How Fiction Works, his new treatise on novelistic technique, that we should "replace the always problematic word 'realism' with the much more problematic word 'truth'"? Is something true (or beautiful, or good) just because James Wood says so?

Words which assembled come to life

• James Wood on character in The Guardian Unlimited.

Still, even if there must clearly be a reasonable middle position, somewhere between the book-club self-identifier and the full-blown postmodern sceptic such as Gass, the difficult question remains: just what is a character? If I say that a character seems connected to consciousness, to the use of a mind, the many superb examples of characters who seem to think very little bristle up (Gatsby, Captain Ahab, Becky Sharp, Jean Brodie). If I refine the thought by repeating that a character at least has some essential connection to an interior life, to inwardness, is seen "from within", I am presented with the nicely opposing examples of those two adulterers, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest, the first of whom does a lot of reflection, and is seen internally as well as externally, the second of whom, in Theodor Fontane's eponymous novel, is seen almost entirely from the outside, with little space set aside for represented reflection. No one could say that Anna is more vivid than Effi simply because we see Anna doing more thinking.

The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as "a novelistic character". There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.

The world that narrates itself

• James Wood on the new Pevear/Volokhonsky War and Peace in The New Yorker.
  

Readers always feel that Tolstoy is both an intrusive narrator—breaking in to explain things, telling us what to think, writing essays and sermons—and a miraculously absent one, who simply lets his world narrate itself. As Isaac Babel put it, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” There is a sense in which Tolstoy is saying to us—to dare a Tolstoyan reading of Tolstoy, for a minute—“I will gladly help you read Natasha’s or Pierre’s or the little princess’s face, but, really, anyone could do it. You don’t need me. For these are the largest, most universal, most natural emotions, not the precious little sweets of the stylish novelist.” The old prince, ignoring his son Andrei’s efforts to tell him about Napoleon’s designs, breaks into croaky song, and sings “in an old man’s off-key voice.” A few pages later, we see “the old prince in his old man’s spectacles and his white smock.” An old man with an old man’s voice and old man’s spectacles: Tolstoy pushes such characterization toward the simplest tautology: What was the old man like? He was like an old man—that is to say, like all old men. What is a young man like? He is like a young man—that is to say, like all young men. What is a happy young woman like? Like all happy young women. The Austrian minister of war is described thus: “He had an intelligent and characteristic head.” A character will tend to look characteristic in both senses of the word: full of character, and somehow typical.

There is a powerful tension in Tolstoy’s work between persons and types, the particular and the general, freedom and laws. The quintessential Tolstoyan atmosphere is one in which highly particularized characters, with their hairy fingers and short lips, experience universal emotions that might easily be transferred from one character to another. This is why the minor characters are as alive as the major ones. In the novel’s epilogue, Nikolai Rostov’s aged mother, the Countess, hears the conversation around her and suddenly perks up. She had finished her tea, Tolstoy writes, “and clearly wished to find a pretext for getting angry after eating.” Now, that is a very Tolstoyan observation, but it is not unique to the Countess. Almost anyone of a certain age in this novel might have felt the same way. (Chekhov, who learned so much from Tolstoy, is comparably subtle, but without the urge to generalize.)

Moving up in the world

• James Wood is heading to The New Yorker.

“Because James is so deeply intelligent, and because the world of fiction and the world of ideas mean so much to him, he is a critic with passionate views,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote in an e-mail message. “But in no way is he a slam artist, an agenda keeper. He is also capable of passionate praise.”

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said, “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.”

Nice spin, that...

Ever the contrarian

• James Wood takes on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.

Whether or not you agree with Wood's dismissal of what he's infamously termed "hysterical realism", he certainly argues his points well.

This is doubtless a rough division, but it has some application to the contemporary postmodern novel. Commentators like to go on about Thomas Pynchon's daunting modernity -- the indexical learning, the fierce assays and essays in thermodynamics and polymers and mathematics, the brilliant parodies and pastiches of different novel genres -- but fewer point out that in some ways he is a very old-fashioned novelist, one whom Fielding (and Cervantes, for that matter) would instantly recognize. Mason & Dixon, written in a flawless pastiche of eighteenth-century prose, was not eccentric, but the logical fruit of Pynchon's aesthetic interests: a busy eighteenth-century novel -- itself already, in some ways, a "postmodern" artifact, because a self-conscious one -- selfconsciously rewritten by a twentieth-century postmodernist.

There is nothing more eighteenth century than Pynchon's love of picaresque plot-accumulation, his mockery of pedantry which is at the same time a love of pedantry, his habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then whisking them away, his vaudevillian fondness for silly names, japes, mishaps, disguises, farcical errors, and so on. His characters sit down and lengthily, larkily "dispute" ideas with each other as if sitting in roadside taverns and sharing pipes and pots of ale. As Fielding is an ironist, insisting on his own moralism while apparently undermining its grounds, so Pynchon likes to promote meaning and then sack it for getting above itself.

How far the mighty have fallen

• John Updike's latest novel is getting really, really bad reviews.

Man, Updike's new one is getting raked over the coals. The latest bitch-slap comes courtesy of James Wood in The New Republic (via Powells):

What is most striking about this novel is that, despite Updike's massive familiarity with the technical challenges of fiction-writing--this is his twenty-second novel, for goodness sake--he proves himself relatively inept at the essential task of free indirect style, of trying to find an authorial voice for his Muslim schoolboy. He will begin a paragraph in his character's voice, and then, apparently losing any capacity for the necessary ventriloquism, decide utterly to write over his character.

I haven't read this one yet, and honestly, all the bad press kind of makes me want to read it, in that sadomasochistic, train-wreck rubbernecking fashion.

Here's what real criticism looks like

It's always nice to read a well-written book review. Two have caught my eye of late:

• Malcolm Gladwell reviews Charles Tilly's Why? at The New Yorker.

Gladwell returns, this time training his lens on humanity's innate need for justification:

When we say that two parties in a conflict are “talking past each other,” this is what we mean: that both sides have a legitimate attachment to mutually exclusive reasons. Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious. By Tilly’s logic, abortion proponents who want to engage their critics will have to become better storytellers—and that, according to the relational principles of such reason-giving, may require them to acknowledge an emotional connection between a mother and a fetus.

...Tilly argues that these conflicts are endemic to the legal system. Laws are established in opposition to stories. In a criminal trial, we take a complicated narrative of cause and effect and match it to a simple, impersonal code: first-degree murder, or second-degree murder, or manslaughter. The impersonality of codes is what makes the law fair. But it is also what can make the legal system so painful for victims, who find no room for their voices and their anger and their experiences. Codes punish, but they cannot heal.

• James Wood reviews Frederick Brown's Flaubert: A Biography at The New York Times.

Much of the time Flaubert's influence is too familiar to be visible. We so expect it that we hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. And after Flaubert, it sometimes seems, this is all you can find.

This really makes me want to read Madame Bovary now. It's been sitting on my shelf for months now, tempting me. That's the great thing about Wood's essays; they charge you up with the appetite for rediscovery. He published a marvelous collection of them in 2000 called The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief; there's a particularly sharp essay on Nikolai Gogol's work which is endemic of his approach on the whole: fond yet unsentimental, practical yet hopeful. He doesn't hold much sympathy, however, for modernists like Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon (and he makes a strong argument for it, too), but you can't have everything in life.